In her 2014 budget, Premier Kathleen Wynne made the populist promise to cut auto insurance premiums by 15 per cent by August 2015. As that deadline looms closer, the Premier is staring down the reality that the rate reduction will not be achieved. In November, an executive from the Insurance Bureau of Canada stated that the 15 per cent reduction would “absolutely” not happen, and that “the government fully knows that although the government has not come out and said it.”

So what is Kathleen Wynne to do about her populist promise to reduce rates?

In her 2015 budget, the Premier included a little reported-on plan to grab benefits in an attempt to convince insurers to forgo profits and reduce rates on their own. This give-and-grab move that will take benefits from catastrophically injured accident victims with the hope that insurance companies will respond by voluntarily reducing their rates.

Catastrophically injured people are those who lost two or more limbs, lost the movement of two limbs, are blinded, or have suffered a severe mental impairment. Catastrophic injuries make up only 1 per cent of all auto insurance claims, but these are the people whose benefits are being grabbed by the Premier. The current $1 million coverage for medical and rehabilitation benefits and $1 million for attendant care benefits of these catastrophically injured people are being reduced to half, and combined. The average medical and attendant care costs for a quadriplegic eclipses $10 million.

This is shameful.

The crux of the problem is that the government wants to have a quasi-market in auto insurance that allows private insurers, but forces them to provide a mandatory product.

Auto insurance is compulsory, and drivers are required to have it. Insurers are required to offer it, and the policies must contain standard benefits that are determined by the government, including mandatory first person coverage (for accidents involving only one vehicle) and no-fault insurance. The benefits that policies pay out are also determined by the government, so the government determines what a basic policy’s maximum pay out for medical care will be if the driver is injured. And of course, the insurance company’s profit margins are also mandated by the government.

While the populist pledge to reduce our sky-high auto insurance rates sounds great, what Ontarians don’t know is that they will no longer have something they previously paid for and relied on to protect them against a terrible and life altering accident. Populist pandering has resulted in a reduction in mandatory benefits about which the government has been silent. So while the premier hopes her trade-off of benefits will achieve her promised rate reduction, she has not been honest about both sides of this promise. Suddenly our Santa Claus Premier doesn’t seem so benevolent after all.

Christine Van Geyn is the Ontario Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. She is called to the bar of Ontario, and her fiancé suffered a catastrophic injury in August 2014.